Clues to the Great Dying

[Kazi Taufiqur Rahman]

Some 252 million years ago, life on Earth nearly ended. In a geologic flash, at least 70 percent of Earth’s land species vanished along with 96 percent of all species in the oceans.

This was a mass extinction. The biggest ever, it far exceeded the one that snuffed out the dinosaurs some 186 million years later. That one knocked out only 50 percent of Earth’s species. The earlier catastrophe is now known as the Permo-Triassic mass extinction because it occurred as the Permian Period gave way to the Triassic.

Its impacts were so massive that scientists now refer to that time as the Great Dying.

[saikat07]

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